Beneath Debate

My patience for political debates gave out long ago. I think the
clincher was a 1984 encounter which somehow favored Ronald Reagan
despite the clear fact that Walter Mondale out-hustled him on every
single question. (I was rather annoyed with Mondale because so many
of those tussles revealed him to be the more aggressive and tenacious
cold warrior.) It was almost a replay of my first debate experience,
Kennedy-Nixon, except where Kennedy appealed to a hopeful future,
that future had passed by 1984 and America was ready to be led into
senility -- at least they sure picked the guy to do it.

However, some bloggers I follow still take these things seriously,
so I figured I'd cite a few of their comments. After all, watching
ten right-wing jerks fumble their way through a set of questions and
spinning them into their fantasies does offer some opportunity to
examine the psychosis that afflicts so-called conservatives today.
Whereas Reagan had a knack for amalgamating an imagined past with a
fantasy future, at least he was pretty sure it would be a positive
future. But today's Republican standard-bearers are united in their
conviction that the nation stands on the brink of a catastrophe that
only their kind of determined leadership can stave off, even though
the scenarios most likely to push the country off the deep end are
the very ones that adopt their policy proposals.

But about Wednesday night's debate -- the topic was economics, and the
big takeaway was probably that when there are 10 people onstage, nobody
is going to have to explain how that flat tax plan adds up. When in doubt,
complain about government regulations.

Carson appears to have a particular genius on this front. Asked what
to do about the pharmaceutical industry's outrageous pricing policies,
he mildly said: "No question that some people go overboard when it comes
to trying to make profits," and then he careened off to the cost of
government rules on "the average small manufacturer."

Every seasoned politician is good at answering a difficult question
with the answer to something entirely different. But Carson -- who isn't
supposed to be a politician at all -- was possibly the champ. Where do
you think he picked that up? It's a little unnerving to think this kind
of talent is useful in the operating room.

Because Carson's voice always sounds so moderate, responses that make
no sense whatsoever can sound sort of thoughtful until you replay them
in your head. Asked why, as an opponent of gay marriage, he serves on
the board of a company that offers domestic partner benefits, Carson
said that he believed "marriage is between one man and one woman and
there is no reason that you can't be perfectly fair to the gay community."
He then proposed, in his measured tones, that "the P.C. culture . . . it's
destroying this nation."

"The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate
why the American people don't trust the media," Ted Cruz said with
considerable disgust. "This is not a cage match."

Cruz ticked off the insults the CNBC moderators had lobbed Wednesday
night at the assembled Republicans. "Donald Trump, are you a comic book
villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two
people over here? Marco Rubio, why don't you resign? Jeb Bush, why have
your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues?"

The crowd roared. Republican pollster Frank Luntz reported with some
awe that his focus group gave Cruz's riff a 98. "That's the highest score
we've ever measured," Luntz tweeted. "EVER."

Cruz's attack on the moderators was smart politics -- but it was almost
precisely backwards. The questions in the CNBC debate, though relentlessly
tough, were easily the most substantive of the debates so far. And the
problem for Republicans is that substantive questions about their policy
proposals end up sounding like hostile attacks -- but that's because the
policy proposals are ridiculous, not because the questions are actually
unfair.

Klein goes on to quote some of the questions that Cruz caricatured:

Moderator John Harwood asked, "Mr. Trump, you have done very well in
this campaign so far by promising to build another wall and make another
country pay for it. Send 11 million people out of the country. Cut taxes
$10 trillion without increasing the deficit."
[ . . . ]

Similarly, Ben Carson wasn't asked whether he could do math. He was
asked whether his tax plan's math added up.

"You have a flat tax plan of 10 percent flat taxes," said moderator
Becky Quick. "This is something that is very appealing to a lot of voters,
but I've had a really tough time trying to make the math work on this.
If you were to take a 10 percent tax, with the numbers right now in
total personal income, you're gonna bring in $1.5 trillion. That is
less than half of what we bring in right now. And by the way, it's
gonna leave us in a $2 trillion hole. So what analysis got you to the
point where you think this will work?" [ . . . ]

Meanwhile, Cruz himself was also asked a substantive question. The
moderators asked why he was opposing a bipartisan budget deal that
would avert a debt ceiling crisis, a Medicare crisis, and a Social
Security Disability Insurance crisis. Rather than answer that question,
he attacked the moderators for refusing to ask substantive questions,
during which he pretended a slew of unusually substantive questions
were trivial political attacks.

Although Klein has some piece of a point -- the candidates certainly
did manage to avoid answering anything substantial in the questions,
more than a few came off as snarky and their opening shot, as
Stephen Colbert justly complains, was the worst question ever.

I sure hope you didn't bother to watch the absurd Republican debate
on CNBC Wednesday night. That's what you have me for. Here are two
takeaways: Ben Carson said "crap." (Specifically, that "the government
picking winners and losers" is "a bunch of crap.") And, remember that
time a few years ago when I wrote that getting anointed a star among
the Republican elite "is mainly a question of riding out the lie:
showing that you have the skill and the stones to brazen it out, and
the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher"? I worry I
understated the case. [ . . . ]

Something you will not learn consuming accounts of the debate
from all those talking heads, the poor saps, forced by the professional
canons of "objectivity" to grit their teeth and pretend what went on
on that stage in Boulder was legitimate political discussion. No. This
was two straight hours of sociopathy.

Perlstein details examples from Carson, Fiorina, and Rubio, but
he could go on and on.

Heather Digby Parton: The medical miracles of Mike Huckabee: Inside the
absurd, dangerous & contradictory health care plans of the GOP
candidates: Parton also looks at Carson, who has a history of
promoting a fraudulent supplement as a miracle cure for Alzheimer's
and cancer. Huckabee, who's made a career out of opposing medical
research based on fetal tissue, has suddenly found the solution to
America's health care woes: "let's cure the four big cost-driving
diseases . . . diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's."
Not clear how he'll do all that -- maybe he's bought into Carson's
snake oil? More likely it's just that old standby of the religious
right: miracles. Huckabee's a big "flat tax" promoter too, if you
want another example of magical thinking. Parton concludes:

So here we have two Republican candidates for president. One has
offered an incomprehensible health care plan that he cannot explain
to the public. The other proposes that the correct approach is to
"pass real reform that will actually lower costs, while focusing
on cures and prevention rather than intervention.") Both of them
oppose fetal tissue research that promise advances in actually
curing diseases while endorsing ludicrous scams that don't work.

Every Republican promises to vote to repeal Obamacare. It's a
litmus test right up there with tax cuts and abortion. Carson says
it's the worst thing since slavery, Huckabee calls it a "nightmare."
It looks like magical snake oil cures are now what passes for serious
health care policy to replace it.

But of course the complaints about the media aren't really about
getting easier questions at debates; they're much more pernicious
than that.

Republicans are working the refs. They don't care what questions
they're asked; what they care about is destroying the credibility
of anyone who might criticize their policies or their rhetoric. When
Quick asked Carson about the $1.1 trillion in new deficits his tax
plan would create, Carson simply replied "That's not true" -- an
assertion he could make confidently because he knows Republican
primary audiences are much more likely to trust Ben Carson than a
member of the media.

Of course his tax plan would be a disaster -- it would involve
huge cuts for the richest Americans and drain the treasury, pushing
America even deeper into debt. But facts, even obvious facts, don't
matter if you can convince people the arbiters of those facts are liars.

Ed Kilgore: Stand With Rand . . . for Nineteen Minutes!: Rand Paul's
big moment in the debate was his announcement that he would fillibuster
the much-hated Bipartisan Budget Deal (at least much-hated by the faction
who'd seize any excuse to shut down the government). Turns out that when
he did take the Senate floor to oppose the bill, he spoke against it all
of 19 minutes. Ted Cruz can't even read Green Eggs & Ham that
fast.

Here at the shebeen, we have been talking almost since our grand opening
in 2011 about how the institutional Republican party is nothing more than
a sham of a mockery of a façade of a shell of its former self. Now, it
seems, the candidates may be forming a creepy little cabal aimed at taking
even the debate process away from obvious anagram Reince Priebus, the
emptiest suit in American politics.

"I think the bigger frustration you saw is that all those candidates
onstage had prepared for a substantive debate. Everyone was ready to
talk about trade policy and the debt and tax policies," Rubio said on
Fox News. "And we're ready for that, everybody was. And then, you got
questions that everyone got, which were clearly designed to get us to
fight against each other or get us to say something embarrassing about
us and then get us to react."

Again, bullshit, all the way down. Rubio was asked a very substantive
question about the lunatic tongue-bath to the wealthy that he calls a
tax plan. John Harwood cited the conservative Tax Foundation's assessment
that his highly redistributive notion of where all the money should end
up would balloon the deficit and be an unprecedented windfall for the
likes of Norman Braman and (shh!) Sheldon Adelson. If Rubio was
"embarrassed" by that question, he should have been.

But nobody is so unencumbered by facts, and nobody is so utterly
unburdened by honesty, as the Tailgunner [Ted Cruz], who has proposed
a debate moderated by the superstars of conservative talk-radio.

"How about a debate moderated by Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Rush
Limbaugh? Now that would be a debate." Hannity replied with enthusiasm:
"I'm in!"

By all means, senator. Let's do that.

I'm not sold on Limbaugh, who has a history of massive flop-sweat
attacks whenever he appears on television, or anywhere else outside the
cocoon of his studio. And Hannity, I think, still wants too much to be
a player in mainstream conservative politics to be very entertaining.
But Mark Levin? Abso-freaking-lutely. Mark Levin thinks Paul Ryan is a
squish. Mark Levin wants the Constitution rewritten to eliminate the
popular election of senators and so that states can nullify federal
laws. Let Levin moderate a debate and he'll push these clowns so far
to the right that they'll end up in Kazakhstan.

Josh Marshall: Some More Thoughts on the Debate: If you dig through
the archives you can probably find his "live blogging" -- which I did
read but have largely forgotten by now. Here he points out that Carly
Fiorina got more time than anyone else (funny no one has tabbed her as
winning or even gaining this time, like they did last debate), and Jeb
Bush "got the least by a significant margin" (although lots of people
have commented on how "sad" or "pathetic" Bush seemed). Plus this:

But as I reflect on the debate a bit more I think a big reason the
debate was so weird was that so many of the questions were based on
obscurantist and myopic CNBC nonsense -- which is not only far-right
and identified with great wealth but specifically owned by the bubble
of Wall Street. That led to a lot of odd questions -- like Jim Cramer's
saying why aren't GM execs going to jail, Santelli's wild questions or
that question about fantasy football. Lots of people are into fantasy
football. But whether it's betting and whether it should be regulated,
that's a Wall Streeter question -- in the same way huge amounts of the
money that gets pushed through political betting sites comes off Wall
Street. It's hard for Republicans to say this. But I think this is a
significant reason why the debate seemed so odd. And it made it kind
of odd to hear anti-liberal bias attacks on the moderators when they
were asking questions like shouldn't the Fed be forced to take us back
to the gold standard.

I should never miss the opportunity to say that the stupidest thing
any political figure can possibly say is that we should go back to the
gold standard.

OK, here are the live blog links:
#1,
#2,
#3,
#57 (who knows)?,
Why is this debate so bad?,
Some initial thoughts. For a much longer live blog -- one that will
take you longer to read than it would have taken to watch the damn thing --
go to
538. Some side-excursions too. One that I found
interesting is that Trump's support is pretty even across the ideological
spectrum (23-28%, plus a blip at 30% for Tea Party), where Carson is
strictly conservative (with a 27% peak for White Evangelical -- a group
that raises Huckabee from 4% to 7% and drops Fiorina from 7% to 2%).

A Republican lobbyist of my acquaintance whose corporate client has
been caught in the middle of the political disturbances shared a
provocative insight. "I finally figured it out," he told me. "Obama
created the Tea Party." I laughed at first, but he explained what he
meant. "We told people that Obama was a dangerous socialist who was
going to wreck America and he had to be stopped, when really we knew
he was a moderate Democrat, not all that radical," the lobbyist said.
"But they believed us."

In other words, the extremist assaults on the black president,
combined with the economic failures, were deeply alarming for ordinary
people and generated a sense of terminal crisis that was wildly
exaggerated. But it generated popular expectations that Republicans
must stand up to this threat with strong countermeasures -- to win
back political control and save the country.

Greider posits an "odd couple" alliance forged by the Nixon and
Reagan "southern strategy" -- a cynical decision by the Republican
establishment to broaden their voting base by catering to the racism
of southern (and let's not forget many northern) whites. I hardly
regard this as so odd: the rich never have the numbers to win in a
democracy, so they always have to wrap their naked self interests
in a cloak of something that might enjoy broader appeal. Since WWII
that was mainly cold war propaganda, with its adulation of capitalism,
defense of religion (against "godless communism"), and the growth of
a military caste with all the patriotic trappings, including a lot of
jingo about "freedom." Admittedly it took a while for Republicans to
appropriate those myths as wholly their own, but Barry Goldwater had
put it together in terms so stark it could be used to tar liberals as
traitors, and Nixon and Reagan only made Goldwater's synthesis more
palatable. (What made Nixon appear to be more moderate was that he
was generally respectful of unions, albeit more due to pragmatism
than to ideology, while Goldwater and Reagan seethed contempt.) If
adding a bit of "dogwhistle racism" adds to the vote total, how much
of an "odd couple" sacrifice is that really to the Republican rich?
There are exceptions, for sure, but the elite country clubs have
never lacked for prejudice or snobbery -- why else refer to them as
"exclusive"?

I don't see Greider's evidence that the contradictions at the root
of the "odd couple" strategy are coming apart -- for one thing, the
appetite of Americans for hypocrisy has never been greater, but also
the rich have gotten so rich they've become oblivious to the damage
and decay the rest of the world have to live in -- but
Republicans do have problems keeping their shit together. The first
big thing is that the Bush administration from 2001-09 was an utter
clusterfuck: so much so that nearly every substantive policy that
any Republican can think of today has been tried out and proven to
be disastrous. Bush ended his term with approval ratings way below
the Mendoza Line (and Cheney's was in single digits, about half of
Bush's). The initial response of sentient Republicans to that debacle
was to crawl into a hole somewhere, but all that did was to let the
crazies loose, and when they seemed to be having some success, the
rest of the party, lacking any better ideas or principles, lined up
behind them. The only reason they've been able to survive by doubling
down on disaster has been their ability to get people to blame the
adverse effects of their policies on the Democrats. (Obama and the
Democrats abetted this not only by continuing many Bush policies,
like the wars in the Middle East and the bank bailouts, but by not
squarely placing blame where it belonged, and by not pushing reforms
that would make a real difference.)

The reason the Tea Party exploded in 2009 was that the Republican
propaganda machine, after eight years of lamely recycling pro-Bush
talking points, got a chance to go on the offensive, and they did so
with a vengeance. They did so by characterizing Obama as a devious
monster "out to wreck America," and they clearly equated America not
with the majority who had voted for Obama but with the small minority
who listened to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck -- a group
that flattered themselves as the only true Americans, the vanguard
to "take America back." They may even be right that "their America"
is slipping away, but they're also letting themselves be used.

I could probably spend several pages just unpacking that last
sentence: there are obvious cons like Beck's gold racket, and there
are broader problems embedded in dozens of policy proposals, and
there are deeper and subtler problems when a society devolves into
nothing but rapacious individuals each out for number one. It seems
like a premise of the debates is that all Republicans think alike,
so the only thing to decide is the character and tone you want in
a leader (ranging from a blowhard like Trump to a soft sell like
Carson).

Music Week

Rated count slipped a bit, mostly because I lost a day-plus cooking
up another chapter in my birthday dinner series. Tried my hand at Cuban
cuisine this time, something I've sampled in restaurants not much more
than a half-dozen times (mostly one in Royal Oak, MI, although we lucked
into a very good place southwest of Miami). I've done a lot of Spanish
(and Basque and Catallan and Portuguese, so should I say Iberian?) dishes,
but very little from south of the border (aside from a massive feijoada
one birthday). As with Spanish, Cubans use a lot of garlic but not much
in the way of chilis. I've never liked the peppers that dominate Mexican
cuisine, although I should figure out my way around them (as I've done
with Indian, Thai, and Indonesian) given that the hardest part of any
exotic cuisine is the shopping, and there are countless Mexican stores
in these parts. (Actually, for this dinner I picked up most of the less
conventional ingredients not from the bilingual Kroger but from a large
Vietnamese grocer I frequent -- among other things, the only place in
town I can get salt cod.)

More details on the dinner in the notebook. Suffice it to say that
despite some very poor planning and last-minute panicking pretty much
everything came out splendid. Good company too, although by the time
I was finished I was a bit too frazzled to get into it. Much on my
mind was the thought that I'm getting too old for this sort of thing.
No one thought to take pictures. Where's Max Stewart when you really
need him? Also nostalgic for so many previous guests, especially Liz
Jones, who inspired the first few dinners (and has long since lost
touch), and the late Liz Fink -- people who really appreciated good
food. (Liz, of course, was represented by her dog Sadie, who earned
the title sous-chef by always being under my feet.)

While cooking, I suspended my usual listening work and played
oldies, starting with the Beatles and winding up with Atlantic R&B.
The former hadn't happened in many years, but when I went out to shop
for the meal, before I could pop a CD in -- I had picked out Rumba
en el Patio by Conjunto Kubavana (1944-47) -- a song came on which
struck me as the most completely marvelous thing I've ever heard: "All
My Loving." I probably hadn't heard it since shortly after I bought
the With the Beatles CD, but I found myself intimately familiar
with every note and harmony. It was followed by Elvis Presley singing
"All Shook Up," by comparison merely great, then something else I only
vaguely recognized and didn't care for.

Most of this week's list already appeared in October's
Rhapsody Streamnotes.
I noted there how many of my jazz picks were by (or featured)
saxophonists, so maybe I'm compensating a bit for that here. My two
top HMs this week -- Rich Halley's Eleven and Scott Hamilton's
Live in Bern -- are by long-time personal favorites who have
already scored A- records this year (Creating Structure and
Plays Jule Styne). I have minor quibbles about both, but I
haven't been conscientious enough to do the A:B comparisons to see
which is really the better record. I will say that there is some
terrific music on both. Instead, I went with another long-time
favorite saxophonist, Rodrigo Amado. I suppose one could quibble
there too, but Joe McPhee (who has another A- record this year)
adds extra bite to some of the year's most impressive sax runs.

The best post-RS record on the list is Marty Grosz's debut. I
noticed that Rhapsody added some old Grosz Jazzology titles, and
worked my way back. I mostly listen to avant-jazz these days, but
I still hold to the idea that the old jazz is the real jazz, so
guys like Grosz are always on my radar. Grosz was born a year
before Bix Beiderbecke died, and well into his 80s he's still
active -- his Fat Babies album Diga Diga Doo is also on
this year's
A-list.

No comments so far on my question whether it'd be worthile to do
another Turkey Shoot/Black Friday Special this year. I dropped the
ball last year and no one picked it up -- I had hopes for Odyshape,
but they crashed shortly before. I don't want to do the heavy lifting
this year -- soliciting and editing entries -- but would be willing
to format and post it and might even contribute something. So let
me know if you want to volunteer. Time is running out. I'm not going
to bring this up again.

Weekend Roundup

No real time to write this week's roundup -- it's my birthday
and I'm busy cooking (see the notebook for the menu). But I do
have a bunch of links open in various tabs and I thought I might
share them before they become stale. In no particular order:

What we have here is temporizing dressed up in policy drag. It is a
gesture designed to convey an appearance of purposefulness to an
enterprise whose actual purpose has long since vanished in the mists
of time.

Having inherited from his predecessor two wars begun in 2001 and
2003, respectively, Obama will bequeath those same two wars to the
person who will succeed him as president in 2017. It is incumbent
upon Americans to contemplate the implications of this disturbing
fact. By their very endlessness, the conflicts in Afghanistan and
Iraq constitute a judgment on American statecraft, one further
compounded by the chaos now enveloping large swaths of the Islamic
world. Here are the consequences that stem from misunderstanding
military power and misusing a military instrument once deemed
unstoppable.

Only by owning up to the mindless failure of U.S. military efforts
since 9/11 does it become possible to restore real choice. Alternatives
to open-ended war waged on the other side of the globe do exist.
Contrary to Carter's lame insistence, the United States can leave
Afghanistan. Protecting Americans from the relatively modest threat
posed by the Taliban or Al Qaeda or Islamic State -- or all three
combined for that matter -- does not require the permanent stationing
of U.S. forces in the Islamic world, especially given the evidence
that the presence of American troops there serves less to pacify
than to provoke.

Peter Beinart: Trump Is Right About 9/11: As was well known if
not at the time then shortly after, there were a number of concrete
things the Bush administration could have done that might have kept
9/11 from happening. Terrorism "czar" Richard Clarke was especially
unhappy about how Bush's neocons dropped the ball on Al-Qaeda, and
Beinart dredges up all that story -- one that few in the press seem
to recall, but which makes Trump's reminder that 9/11 happened
during Bush's presidency appear to have more weight. Beinart
could have made an even stronger case had he pointed out some of
the things Bush did to aggravate tensions in the Middle East, such
as his Clinton-esque bombing of Iraq and his support for Sharon's
Counter-Intifada in Palestine. One might counter that Trump has
unrealistic notions about what presidents can do, but that's a big
part of his charm (or absurdity).

Kathleen Frydl: Donald Trump and the Know-Nothings: More useful
as an historical excursion into the short-lived 1850s nativist party
than as an analysis of Trump himself, but that's because the "Know
Nothings" were more colorful and their ignorance was more florid.
One of history's great truisms: stupid people in the past could be
interesting, but stupid people today are just tiresome.

The internal discussion in Israel is more militant, threatening and
intolerant than it has ever been. Talk has trended toward fundamentalism
ever since the Israeli operation in Gaza in late 2008, but it has recently
gone from bad to worse. There seems to be only one acceptable voice,
orchestrated by the government and its spokespeople, and beamed to all
corners of the country by a clan of loyal media outlets drowning out all
the others. Those few dissenters who attempt to contradict it -- to ask
questions, to protest, to represent a different color from this artificial
consensus -- are ridiculed and patronized at best, threatened, vilified
and physically attacked at worst. Israelis not "supporting our troops" are
seen as traitors, and newspapers asking questions about the government's
policies and actions are seen as demoralizing.
[ . . . ]

The cumulative effect of this recent mindless violence is hugely
disturbing. We seem to be in a fast and alarming downward swirl into a
savage, unrepairable society. There is only one way to respond to what's
happening in Israel today: We must stop the occupation. Not for peace
with the Palestinians or for their sake (though they have surely suffered
at our hands for too long). Not for some vision of an idyllic Middle
East -- those arguments will never end, because neither side will ever
budge, or ever be proved wrong by anything. No, we must stop the
occupation for ourselves. So that we can look ourselves in the eyes.
So that we can legitimately ask for, and receive, support from the
world. So that we can return to being human.

And to a remarkable extent, the default position of conservatives has
less and less to do with arguments about the efficacy of gun regulation
or the need for guns to deter or respond to crime. Instead, it's based
on the idea that the main purpose of the Second Amendment is to keep
open the possibility of revolutionary violence against the U.S.
government.

This was once an exotic, minority view even among gun enthusiasts
who tended to view the Second Amendment as protecting an individual
right to gun ownership not to overthrow the government but to supplement
the government's use of lethal force against criminals.
[ . . . ]

Nowadays this revolutionary rationale for gun rights is becoming
the rule rather than the exception for conservative politicians and
advocates. Mike Huckabee, a sunny and irenic candidate for president
in 2008, all but threatened revolutionary violence in his recent
campaign book for the 2016 cycle, God, Guns, Grits and Gravy:

If the Founders who gave up so much to create liberty for us could see
how our government has morphed into a ham-fisted, hypercontrolling
"Sugar Daddy," I believe those same patriots who launched a revolution
would launch another one. Too many Americans have grown used to Big
Government's overreach. They've been conditioned to just bend over and
take it like a prisoner [!]. But in Bubba-ville, the days of bending
are just about over. People are ready to start standing up for freedom
and refusing to take it anymore.

Dr. Ben Carson, another candidate thought to be a mild-mannered
Christian gentleman, recently disclosed that he used to favor modest
gun control measures until he came to realize the importance of
widespread gun ownership as a safeguard against "tyranny."

"When you look at tyranny and how it occurs, the pattern is so
consistent: Get rid of the guns," Carson told USA Today.
[ . . . ]

Indeed, a lot of Second Amendment ultras appear to think the right
to revolution is entirely up to the individual revolutionary.

My own view is that the second amendment was meant to ensure
that state militias would be able to fight the Civil War, although
the other obvious reading had to do with fighting Indians. Both
meanings had become obsolete by 1900, and civilians have never
had a significant role in fighting against criminals. The second
amendment wasn't repealed then because it didn't seem to be all
that harmful -- no least because the courts consistently ruled
against an individual right to guns. That's only changed recently,
and the full impact has yet to be felt, but what's disturbing
about it isn't just the increase in the number of guns out there
and the number of (often incompetent) people carrying them, but
the sheer nonsense gun advocates wind up spouting. One stupid
idea is that if everyone was armed we'd all wind up treating
each other with more proper respect. A deeper one is that we're
shifting responsibility for managing conflict from law and the
courts to the streets. Then there's the notion Kilgore dwells
on, that because individuals have a right to own guns they have
a right to use them to oppose the rule of law when they (alone)
find it unjust. The latter is often used not just to rationalize
gun ownership but to permit individuals to own ever more powerful
firearms because that's what it would take to neutralize the
power of the state. The problem here is not just practical --
after all, we're talking about a state that owns AC-130 gunships
that can fire thousands of rounds of depleted uranium per minute,
and that's not even the scariest example. The real problem is
that it gives up on making sure the state is responsible to the
public in a fair and equitable way.

As the inherent contradiction between Israel's self-image as a modern,
democratic and progressive country and the reality of a half-century-long
brutal occupation become clear to all, the erosion of support for Israel
by the emerging generation of American Jews will continue and likely
increase, with profound consequences not just for Israel but also for
the future of the American Jewish community.

Josh Marshall: Netanyahu Reduced to Defending Hitler, Really . . .:
This is the first piece I saw on Netanyahu's speech to the World Zionist
Congress, where he argued that Hitler "just wanted to deport the Jews"
until he met exiled Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, whose answer
to Hitler's "So what should I do with them?" was "Burn them." With the
Palestinian Revolt of 1937-39 failed, al-Husseini went into exile and
spent WWII in Nazi Germany. It is known that he met with Hitler once,
in 1941, and Israelis have been trying to make mountains out of that
mole hill ever since. Still, it seems bizarre that any Israeli, much
less the Prime Minister, would try to make Hitler seem less horrific
just to blame some Palestinian -- anything, I guess, to distract from
all of Israel's self-inflicted problems. More links on this:

The causal chain begins with the role of the U.S. in creating a mujahedeen
force to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden
was a key facilitator in training that force in Afghanistan. Without that
reckless U.S. policy, the blowback of the later creation of al-Qaida would
very likely not have occurred. But it was the U.S. invasion and occupation
of Iraq that made al-Qaida a significant political-military force for the
first time. The war drew Islamists to Iraq from all over the Middle East,
and their war of terrorism against Iraqi Shiites was a precursor to the
sectarian wars to follow.

The actual creation of Islamic State is also directly linked to the
Iraq War. The former U.S. commander at Camp Bucca in Iraq has acknowledged
that the detention of 24,000 prisoners, including hard-core al-Qaida
cadres, Baathist officers and innocent civilians, created a "pressure
cooker for extremism." It was during their confinement in that camp
during the U.S. troop surge in Iraq 2007 and 2008 that nine senior
al-Qaida military cadres planned the details of how they would create
Islamic State.

According to a joint report by the UN Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs, 2,682 civilian deaths and injuries resulted from
air bombardment in Yemen from late March to the end of July 2015 --
more than anywhere else in the world during the first seven months of
the year.

The Saudis have also imposed a tight blockade on Yemen by air, land
and water, to prevent not only weapons, but also food, fuel and medicine
from reaching millions of Yemenis, creating a humanitarian disaster.
Doctors Without Borders declared in July that the Saudi blockade was
killing as many people in Yemen as the bombing. US Navy ships have
been patrolling alongside Saudi ships to prevent arms from entering
Yemen, while disclaiming any involvement in the Saudi-led blockade
of food, fuel and medical supplies.

The Amnesty report points out that the United States has a legal
obligation under the Arms Trade Treaty not to provide weaponry it
knows will be used in the indiscriminate bombing of Yemen. Article
6 of that treaty, which entered into force in October 2014, forbids
the transfer of arms and munitions to a party to an armed conflict
if it has knowledge that the weaponry will be used for "attacks
directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such,
or other war crimes as defined by international agreements to which
it is a party."

For Abbas, political survival depended on making significant gains
before any of this occurred. His strategy entailed several gambles.
First, that providing Israel with security, informing on fellow
Palestinians, and suppressing opposition to the occupation would
convince Israel's government that Palestinians could be trusted
with independence. Second, that after Palestinians had met US
demands to abandon violence, build institutions and hold democratic
elections, the US would put pressure on Israel to make the concessions
necessary to establish a Palestinian state. Third, that after being
invited to participate in legislative elections, Hamas would win
enough seats to be co-opted but too few to take over. Fourth, that
by improving the Palestinian Authority economy and rebuilding its
institutions, Abbas would buy enough time to achieve Palestinian
statehood.

In all four respects, he came up short. Israel took his security
co-operation for granted and the Israeli public did not demand that
its government reward Abbas for his peaceful strategy. The US did not
apply the necessary pressure to extract significant concessions from
Israel. Hamas won the legislative elections, took over Gaza, and
refused to adopt Abbas's political programme (though Hamas's victory
also strengthened international support for Abbas, as the international
community shifted from democracy promotion to democracy prevention).
And West Bankers, though dependent on the jobs and economic infrastructure
provided by the PA, also resent it, and have lost whatever faith they
once had that Abbas's strategy could succeed. According to an opinion
poll taken last month, two-thirds of West Bankers and Gazans want him
to resign.

Daily Log

Planning out birthday dinner (Cuban theme). Cookbooks:

Ana Sofia Pelaez/Ellen Silverman: The Cuban Table: A Celebration
of Food, Flavors, and History

I split the calabaza in half and made both dishes -- each impressive
in its own way although the broiled pineapple made a difference. On the
other hand, I ran out of burners, and out of time. I ditched the Mariscos
en Salsa de Coco and moved the scallops I had marinated into the shrimp
dish. I'm not sure I really got it right, although it wasn't bad. Also
never got to the avocado salad, nor to the coffee. I also cut back and
only made a half-recipe of rice. That turned out to be a good decision,
given that we still had some leftover. Minor quibbles on the food --
the picadillo was not as good as last time I fixed it (possibly the
victim of the last-minute rush); the beans could have been softer;
the corn seemed to lose heat quickly, and the cotijo cheese tended
to flake off; the ox-tail wasn't easy to serve (four big pieces, a
few very small ones) but was a revelation if you were able to dig the
meat out; some of the dates in the ice cream were tough (I'd almost
say leathery). The last-minute rush got me flustered, and left the
kitchen a complete mess.

I had only made Cuban food a couple times before, and only had
one real cookbook to work out of. Nearly all the dishes are braises,
so the tendency is to collect a lot of pots on the stove toward the
end. I had six burners operating, and needed two more. I should have
done more of the prep up front -- nearly everything was built on the
same sofrito. Still, came out pretty good. Had ten people, so the
table was pretty crowded.

Rhapsody Streamnotes (October 2015)

The Counter-Intifada Grows Desperate

I don't really understand what's been going on there over the last
few weeks, other than that it this episode of escalating violence isn't
all that different from every other one -- in that it's mostly explained
by the exhaustion of hope for change by any means other than yet another
mass uprising. In 1989, as 22 years of military rule over the Occupied
Territories turned increasingly rote and rigid, numb and dumb, with the
Palestinian political leadership broken and scattered, the popular revolt
that broke out was called the intifada -- an Arabic word denoting
a tremor, shivering, shuddering, derived from nafada meaning to
shake, to shake off, to get rid of. It was an almost involuntary response
to the daily grind of oppression, and it took the PLO as much by surprise
as it shocked Israel's security czars. Their kneejerk reaction then was
summed up in Yitzhak Rabin's vow to "break the bones" of those who would
dare protest against Israeli power. Nearly all of the violence was the
work of Israelis, who killed hundreds of Palestinians, injured and/or
detained thousands, and looked foolish. The worst the Palestinians did
was to throw rocks at the armed gendarmes, not exactly textbook nonviolence
but for two peoples who grew up on the stories of David and Goliath, more
an act of symbolic than physical resistance.

Rabin eventually saw the the way out of the embarrassment of the Intifada
was to insert a buffer layer of Palestinian "leaders" between the Israeli
masters and most of the Palestinian masses: a role that Yassir Arafat all
too readily agreed to, as long as it was sugar-coated with vague promises
of future Palestinian independence. This was the Oslo "peace process" --
by design it spurred a redoubling of Israeli efforts to "create facts on
the ground" (Israel's jargon for building illegal settlements and outposts
on occupied Palestinian land) while forces on both sides -- and not just
the "extremists" like Kach-ist settlers and Hamas -- worked to poison the
agreement. We can only speculate on what might have happened had Rabin
not been assassinated; had his successor, Shimon Peres, not recklessly
provoked a wave of Hamas terrorism which got him voted out; had Benjamin
Netanyahu not come to power and used that power to subvert the "process";
had Ehud Barak, elected with a mandate to deliver the "final status"
negotiations, not gotten cold feet, reneged on his promises, tore up the
Oslo agreement, initiated the so-called "Second Intifada" while ushering
Ariel Sharon into power to nail the coffin shut. But what we know now
is that the growing power of Israel's settler movement, its militarist
security state, and its right-wing political parties, has buried, as
far into the future as we can see, any prospect for equal rights, for
justice and peace, under Israel's yoke.

It's unfair to blame the Second Intifada for killing Oslo, but the
resort to violence by Hamas and factions of the PLO, especially the
practice of "suicide bombing," helped to harden right-wing Israeli
attitudes and determination. I always thought the two Intifadas were
completely different phenomena: the former a spontaneous mass revolt
in the face of Israel's overwhelming potential violence; the latter
a calculated attempt by small cadres of militants to show Israel's
powers that their subversion of the "peace process" must have adverse
consequences for the Israeli people. The former exposed the rotten
truth about Israel's "enlightened occupation"; the latter revealed
that in a naked test of violence with Israel the Palestinians never
stood a chance.

The great failure of Arafat's political leadership was that he was
never able to move beyond his famous UN speech where he offered Israel
the choice of peace or war, symbolized by an olive branch and an AK-47.
When he failed to negotiate a "final status" deal with Barak in 2000 --
which as we now know was almost totally Barak's fault -- his natural
instinct was to pick up the gun. It's not clear to me that's what he
did: he always held out the hope for further negotiations, but he
couldn't distance himself from the militants without admitting that
he had no control over them, and as such no leverage against Israel
(or for that matter use to Israel). The notion that Arafat launched
the "Al-Aqsa Intifada" -- the term widely abused to associate the
Second Intifada with the Moslem holy site, hence with Jihad -- is as
ridiculous as the notion that Arafat rejected "unprecedentedly generous
offers" at Camp David. Besides, we now know the Intifada was something
the Palestinians were goaded into: by Barak's self-serving spin after
Camp David, by Sharon's massive armed "visit" to the Al-Aqsa Mosque,
and most of all by Chief of Staff Shaul Moffaz's decision to open fire
on Palestinian demonstrators against Sharon's provocations. It's never
seemed quite right to view the violence of 2000-05 as an intifada
when it was originally set up as an ambush.

It's hard to change long-established terminology, but it would make
more sense to refer to the 2000-05 ("Second Intifada") period as the
Counter-Intifada. The original Intifada led to the Oslo Agreements and
the "peace process" which the Counter-Intifada destroyed: that much should
by now be perfectly clear. One can debate whether the Counter-Intifada
ever ended: Arafat died in November 2004, depriving the Intifada of its
most prominent boogeyman (his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, was so firmly
opposed to the Intifada that he was useless as an enemy face, a role
that was quickly shifted to Hamas); Sharon withdrew Israeli settlements
from Gaza in September 2005; in 2006 Hamas called a truce, and entered
the Palestinian Authority's electoral system, winning a landslide before
being cut off by a US-sponsored coup attempt. And while Israel's military
actions against Palestinians never really subsided, including massive
shellings against Gaza in 2006 (and 2008-09 and 2012 and 2014), the
violence was at least temporarily eclipsed by Israel's brutal 2006
bombardment of Lebanon (Condoleezza Rice's notorious "birth pangs of
a new Middle East").

Levels of eruptive violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
have waxed and waned, but Israel has always threatened and exercised
much more violence in its efforts to control Palestinians. In most
years since 1967, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces
is ten times as many as the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian
"terrorists." Ironically, the ratio drops to about four-to-one in
2001-03, the one (and only) period where there was significant armed
Palestinian resistance. (By the way, the distinction between "eruptive"
and "potential" violence is a key concept in the book The One State
Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine, by Ariella
Azoulay and Adi Ophir. Eruptive violence is something that Israelis and
Palestinians can compete at, but potential violence totally favors
Israel: it is, for instance, what allows Israel to require permits, to
impose checkpoints, to pick up and hold prisoners. Comparing the ratios
of killed or injured, even when we're talking ten-to-one, doesn't even
hint at balancing the power scales.)

Most eruptive violence is, at least as rationalized by those who
perpetrate it, retaliatory, which means as a first approximation is
perpetual, a self-sustaining cycle. However, the actual incidence is
far from regular. Palestinians, who suffer disproportionately, are
more likely to declare unilateral truces and less likely to break
them. And while Palestinians will sometimes inflict violence just to
remind Israel that Israel's own violence will not go unanswered,
Israelis put much more stock in the deterrence value of violence.
Moreover, Israelis are much more likely to see violence as a path
to personal advancement. For starters, a majority of Israel's
Prime Ministers built their careers on their military records --
more if you count paramilitary terrorists like Begin and Shamir.
And as Israel continues its drift toward the extreme right, even
mainstream politicians take on genocidal airs.

But while Israel's eruptive violence never seems to go away --
the one exception was the year-and-a-half from when Barak won with
his peace mandate in 1998 until he squandered it at Camp David and
let Sharon run amok at Al-Aqsa in 2000 -- the eagerness of Palestinian
militants to match Israel's violence with their own seems to roughly
correlate with a generational (12-15 year) cycle -- making this year's
uptick in stabbings seem like a harbinger of a third Intifada. I think
three things are going on here: (1) people confuse intifada --
a significant increase in activism meant to "throw off" the occupier --
with violence, a tactic that cannot conceivably stand up against the
military and police power of Israel; (2) much of the talk of Intifada
comes from militant groups seeking to exploit widespread discontent
for their own sectarian purposes (or, conversely, from Israelis who
see the militants as their ticket to more devastating repression;
(3) while at the same time a rigorously non-violent intifada,
aimed at soliciting international support especially for the boycott,
divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign, has been the predominant
political expression of Palestinians for the last decade -- Israelis
hope that by provoking more violence they can draw attention away
from non-violent and increasingly international organization.

The uptick in violence that's been getting the most attention (at
least in the US press) concerns stabbing attacks, notably in Jerusalem.
The location is significant because Netanyahu's administration has been
especially active in building Jewish-only settlements and in isolating
Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. One thing that can drive
people to desperate acts of violence is hopelessness, and life for
Palestinians in East Jerusalem has never been grimmer. I've yet to
see a comprehensive report on such events (maybe one will show up in
the links below), but my initial impression is that the stabbings are
ineffective even on their own terms: hardly any of the people stabbed
die, few are injured seriously, while nearly all of the stabbers are
quickly apprehended and/or killed on the spot. Rather, this seems like
some form of suicide ritual. Some years back one of Israel's security
gurus said that the goal of the occupation was to convince Palestinians
that they are "an utterly defeated people." When I read that I didn't
know what it might look like, but here it is.

Of course, what I just said only applies to Palestinians attempting
to stab Jews. There have been a similar number of Israeli Jews stabbing
Palestinians (plus at least one case of an Israeli Jew stabbing a Mizrahi
Jew mistaken as Arab). In those cases the assailant is much less likely
to be apprehended, let alone gunned down immediately. And if arrested,
the Israeli Jew is less likely to be convicted, and far less likely to
serve any significant time behind bars. Israel has different courts for
Jews and Palestinians, different laws, different rights of appeal, and
different punishments -- there is, for instance, no death penalty for
Israeli citizens, but Palestinians are routinely targeted extrajudicially.
Again, I haven't seen a clear statistical analysis, but a casual review
of news items (Kate's compendia at Mondoweiss is a good source) suggests
that Israeli settlers have become much more violent in the last couple
of years, and that officials are doing little to curb their enthusiasm.

Israel's elections last year brought the most extreme right government
to power in the nation's history, with Netanyahu finally making explicit
his opposition to any form of peace settlement. His cabinet includes
members who have called for the forcible expulsion of all Palestinians,
in some cases Israeli citizens as well as the unfortunate inhabitants
of the Occupied Territories. Last year Israel stepped up harassment of
the West Bank, then turned to a 51-day bombardment of Gaza where its kill
rate rivals that of Syria's Assad regime. (For some reason you never hear
about Israel "killing its own people" like Saddam and the Kurds or Assad
and the Sunnis although the ethnic differences are comparable.) Lately
various Israeli religious leaders have issued ruling that aim to legitimize
indiscriminate killing of Palestinians, while the Netanyahu government has
adopted the policy of shooting stone throwers.

If you know one thing about Israel it should be the utter unwillingness
of its right-wing political class to do anything to mitigate a conflict
that goes back 50 or 70 or 100 years. (Amy Dockser Marcus' Jerusalem
1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israel Conflict sees the origin in 1913
resolutions that committed Zionists to seeking exclusive power over Eretz
Israel.) They grew up on that conflict, thrived even, advancing to the
most prestigious positions in an increasingly militarized society. And
quite frankly, they wouldn't know what to do without the conflict -- so
they fight on, inventing new existential threats to replace vanquished
ones. (Egypt might have been a real one had they focused on Israel but
Nasser had other preoccupations. Syria was never a threat without Egypt
as an ally. Iraq had actually fought Israel in 1948, but Saddam Hussein
was much more interested in the Lebensraum to his east. And Iran, even
under the Ayatollahs, had never been less than friendly toward Israel,
but Netanyahu sold them to the Americans as a monstrous threat -- which
worked because deep down Americans realized that Iran had good reason
to hate the United States.) They even find threats hiding in the closets,
like the so-called demographic problem. And they've so conditioned the
Israeli public, long steeped in the legacy of Jewish victimhood from the
razing of the ancient temples to the Holocaust, that every act against
them, regardless of how trivial -- like the rockets from Gaza that never
hit anything, or a vote from an American church group to divest from
companies that profit from the occupation, or an agreement between Iran
and the world ensuring that Iran won't develop nuclear weapons -- is
received by ordinary Israelis as nothing less than bone-chilling terror.

The main thing you'll learn if you read Tom Segev's 1967: Israel,
the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East is how split
Israelis were over the coming war: on the one hand, the military leaders
were utterly confident of victory; on the other hand, the Israeli public
was completely terrified. Of course, overconfidence is endemic in the
military (cf. Germany and Japan in WWII, everyone in WWI, Bush in Iraq),
but has rarely been rewarded so quickly as when Israel attacked Egypt
in 1967. Victory inflated the egos of all Israelis, especially the
quaking masses who concluded they were protected not just by the IDF
but by God. Israel's leaders were still cognizant enough of world (and
especially American) opinion to treat lightly, but almost immediately
a dynamic developed where civilians (notably the energized Gush Emunim)
and politicians competed to see who could most aggressively expand the
Yishuv onto Palestinian land, over the Palestinian people.

For many years, politicians like Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon
exploited the settler movement for their own (mostly militarist)
purposes, but under Netanyahu it's hard to tell who's pushing whom,
in large part because the settler movement and the political powers
have largely become one. Netanyahu's own contribution to this comes
not just from his pedigree as right-wing royalty -- his father was
Vladimir Jabotinsky's secretary in exile in New York -- as from
his conceit that he is a master not just of Israeli but of American
politics. Moshe Dayan famously said that "America gives us money,
arms, and advise; we take the money and arms, and ignore the advice."
Even as powerful a politician as Sharon had to humor George Bush
when he came calling. Netanyahu, on the other hand, has repeatedly
flaunted his contempt for Obama, confident that no matter what the
President feels the US is stuck in its carte blanche support of all
things Israeli.

Whether Netanyahu is right about America remains to be seen, but
for how his position has freed Israel from any pretense of civility --
the last barrier against all sorts of ghastly policies. One could
write a whole book about what right-wing Israelis are up to, both
as officials and as vigilantes -- indeed, Max Blumenthal wrote one
such, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, but his
2013 book already seems quaintly dated. The upshot is that a growing
number of Israelis have decided that they can't abide the presence
of non-Jews anywhere in Eretz Israel, even completely submissive
ones. That's probably not a majority view yet, but one should recall
that in 1937, when the British offered to "transfer" all the Arabs
out of the proposed Jewish partition of Palestine, the notoriously
pragmatic David Ben-Gurion was little short of ecstatic. (A decade
later, Ben-Gurion engineered the nakba -- the expulsion of
700,000 Palestinians from territory seized by Israel. Ben-Gurion
argued against seizing more land in the 1967 war on grounds that
this time the Arabs wouldn't flee, but like everyone else got caught
up in the glory of Israel's "victory.") The fact is that as far back
as 1913 "transfer" has been a fundamental (albeit sometimes tactically
unspoken) plank of the Zionist platform. The question isn't whether
a majority of Zionist-identified Israelis approve of "transfer" --
it's only whether it can be done cleanly, and even that matters less
as Israel proves they can get away with ugly.

As it happens, Netanyahu is running two pilot projects to show the
feasibility of "transfer" ("ethnic cleansing" is the more accurate
term, even if it, too, is merely a euphemism -- the Serbs coined it
at Srebrenica). One involves the Bedouin who have for ages lived in
the Negev Desert in the southern quarter of Israel. The plan there
is to force them off the land and move them into newly constructed
Arab-only villages (synonyms are ghettos and concentration camps).
This would allow Israel to build new Jewish-only settlements pushing
ever further into the Desert. The other is in East Jerusalem, which
Israel took from Jordan in the 1967 war and "annexed" days later.
Israelis have been building Jewish-only neighborhoods ever since,
but as "security tensions" increase they've become more aggressive
at isolating and separating Palestinian neighborhoods. The latest
round of closures, house demolitions, and exiles are clearly meant
to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem, eventually aiming at a city
where only Jews can live. And when that happens, demands to raze
the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build a Third Temple -- something we already
hear -- will be deafening.

For many years now critics have pointed out the similarities
between Israel and other colonial settler states -- notably South
Africa, with its Apartheid policies. The links if anything go
deeper: Israelis call their foundation, in emulation of the United
States, their War for Independence, but in fact Israel preserved
nearly all of Britain's intrinsically racist colonial laws -- they
merely reshuffled who was privileged and who was not. Ever since
1948, Palestinians under Israeli control have lived under unequal
laws and an often brutal administration, impoverished by both formal
and informal descrimination. But while growing inequality is a grave
political and economic, indeed moral, problem in the US (and very
likely within the Jewish segment of Israel), non-Jews under Israeli
control are locked by birth into a life of perpetual crisis, one
that is currently worsening, one which ultimately, at least on the
individual level, is a matter of life or death.

Whether Israel arrives at the final solution that is the logical
outcome of Zionist ideology and unchecked power ultimately depends
on whether they can stop themselves. There are, for instance, some
number of dissenters within Israel: some are explicitly anti-Zionist,
some style themselves as post-Zionist; more are repulsed by the
growing violence of the settler movement, or by the chokehold of
established orthodox Judaism. The BDS movement is also likely to
become more of a burden to Israel, especially if the atrocities
the current regime seems to produce like clockwork mount and the
credibility of Israeli hasbara wanes. Given how modest the
BDS movement's goals are -- equal rights for all, the one thing
we should all be able to compromise on -- one can't call BDS a
threat to Israel, except inasmuch as Israelis insist that their
privileges and prerogatives should be maintained to the exclusion
of everyone else.

This video shows Ahmad after he was struck by the settler driver. Two
Israeli ambulances arrive and emergency medical personnel approach,
stand over him, and then withdraw. Bystanders curse the wounded
13-year-old boy, telling him: "Die, you son of a bitch," and goading
police to shoot him.

As of Wednesday, at least 31 Palestinians have been killed and as
many as 1,200 others injured amid escalating clashes between Israeli
security forces and protesters in Gaza and the West Bank in the past
two weeks alone. During this period, eight Israelis have been killed
and dozens others injured. [ . . . ]

Those suspected of committing a terrorist act will have their
residency permits revoked, effectively expelling them from Jerusalem.
This is just one more instance in a series of acts of ethnic cleansing
imposed by Israel.

This is a return to the martial law regime which ruled over Israeli
Palestinians from 1948-1966. Under these regulations, they were not
governed by civil law, but by a military government which imposed a far
more restrictive regime. This new development is yet another sign of
devolution from democratic rule and values into a form of authoritarianism.
It further reinforces the notion of apartheid in which Israeli Jews enjoy
superior rights to the Arab minority. [ . . . ]

On Sunday, Israeli journalist Meron Rapoport quoted a series of
statements from various Israeli ministers and NGOs indicating that the
government is at fault for inciting the latest wave of protests. He
quotes the current culture minister, Miri Regev, who said a year ago:
"It is unacceptable that Muslims should have freedom of worship on the
Temple Mount, but not Jews." Regev, who was former chairman of the
interior for the Knesset at the time, advocated a division of the site
as exists at the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Baruch Goldstein murdered
29 Palestinians in 1994. [ . . . ]

On Sunday, IDF soldiers raided the Bethlehem offices of the International
Middle East Media Center, a Palestinian human rights organization which
documents the activities of security personnel in the West Bank. Video
surveillance footage shows a gang of soldiers breaking into the office
at 4 a.m. They rampaged through the facility, overturning and breaking
computers, destroying equipment and stealing files containing the records
of informants.

After a prior IDF break-in, the organization discovered that its
informants were later arrested and harassed by security forces and
threatened for engaging in the legal act of observing and documenting
the actions of Israeli security personnel. [ . . . ]

Last week, in one of the most heinous of a series of incidents in
which Palestinians were killed by Israeli security and police forces,
Fadi Alloun, a 20-year-old man from the village of Issawiya, was
accosted by a mob of Israelis near Jerusalem's Old City. This unruly
group, believing that Alloun had stabbed an Israeli Jew, pursued him,
screaming: "Shoot him, shoot him!" They summoned the police, and when
an officer arrived at the scene and exited his vehicle, he immediately
shot and killed the Palestinian with multiple shots.
[ . . . ]

Over the weekend, a freelance journalist and Palestinian investigator
for Human Rights Watch wearing a clearly marked "Press" sign, was shot
three times -- twice with rubber bullets, and once with live ammunition --
by Israeli forces as she documented and photographed a protest. She could
easily have been killed. Israeli forces have been known in the past to
directly target and even kill Palestinian journalists covering unrest
in a systematic assault on the press. [ . . . ]

He continues, relaying the experiences of others on the ground,
including a young man who drove his wounded friend to the hospital on
Friday, journalists who agree that it seems "live bullets were fired
at specific targets," and doctors who said "they were shocked at the
numbers of victims with precise bullet wounds, which they say appeared
to be deliberately aimed not to injure, but to kill or cause the maximum
amount of damage." [ . . . ]

It's important to note that Jewish terrorists are never shot, let
alone murdered, when apprehended in the midst of an attack. After a
Jew stabbed three Palestinians and a Bedouin in Dimona over the weekend,
not a hair on his head was mussed. When Yaakov Schlissel murdered an
Israeli woman at the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade this summer, he wasn't
harmed in any way. The only Jewish terrorists ever killed during
commission of their acts of mass murder were Baruch Goldstein and
Eden Natan Zenda, who were killed by their Palestinian victims. There
are Israeli Jews who have the temerity to condemn Palestinians for
taking the law into their own hands in these cases.

The focus on Jerusalem in general and Al-Aqsa in particular seems
intent on provoking the most devout Muslims (and perhaps also of
messianic Jews) into acts of violence. I can't describe either the
Mosque or the West Wall as "holy places" because I believe all such
designations are ridiculous, and doing so only feeds the fantasy
world of the "believers" -- something that has long hampered efforts
to settle the conflict. The 1967 decision to carve out a Jewish
space around the West Wall while leaving the Haram al-Sharif to
the Waqf was a concession to coexistence that is increasingly
rejected by right-wing Israelis: even those who don't particularly
relish the erection of a Third Temple see it as a blight on Jewish
power in the Jewish state. Those same people object not just to any
sort of parity with non-Jews but to their very presence, especially
in their Holy City. Pretty much everything that we are witnessing
derives from the notion that the end game requires the elimination
of non-Jews from Israel. Piecemeal this is becoming Israeli policy,
dismantling all checks against the abuse of total power. Netanyahu
and his ilk are being swept along by the mob, because they have no
alternative vision.

Strangely, in the face of all this, there are signs of a parallel
breakdown of order and leadership on the Israeli side.

Mobs of Jews patrol Jerusalem and Israeli cities, calling out
"Death to the Arabs!" A jittery soldier causes pandemonium by firing
his rifle in a train carriage after a bogus terror alert. An innocent
Eritrean asylum seeker is shot by a security guard during an attack
because he looks "Arab," then beaten to a pulp by a lynch mob that
includes soldiers.

Meanwhile, politicians and police commanders stoke the fear. They
call for citizens to take the law into their own hands. Palestinian
workers are banned from Jewish towns. Israeli supermarkets remove
knives from shelves, while 8,000 Israelis queue up for guns in the
first 24 hours after permit rules are eased.

Some of this reflects a hysteria, a heightened sense of victimhood
among Israelis, fuelled by the knife attack videos. But the mood dates
to before the current upheavals.

It is also a sign of the gradual leaching of the settler's lawlessness
into the mainstream. A popular slogan from the past weeks is: "The army's
hands are tied." Israeli civilians presumably believe they must take up
arms instead.

Four Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv, voted Sunday to temporarily ban
all Arab workers from their schools.

"Entrance to cleaning and maintenance workers will be forbidden during
school hours," the Hod Hasharon municipality wrote on its website.

Israel's Education Ministry has yet to comment, but the Interior
Ministry released a statement calling for municipalities to "continue
to act with respect and equality towards all their workers, irrespective
of religion, ethnicity or gender."

Israeli police were also granted greater stop-and-frisk powers. Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated Sunday that these measures were
about "preserving the status quo, we will continue to do so."

The Palestinians in Jerusalem live in a very peculiar situation. They
carry Israeli identity cards, so they enjoy freedom of movement denied
to their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But contrary
to Palestinians living in Israel, they are not Israeli citizens and
their temporary residency status could be abolished at any time.

And above all, Jerusalemite Palestinians feel the burden of Israeli
discrimination on a daily basis. While they represent 37 percent of
the total population in the city, the poverty rate among them has
reached 75 percent, a third of their youth drops out before finishing
high school and 39 percent of their houses are built without permits.
Events on al-Aqsa ignited a longstanding frustration built for many
years.

As always, Israel responded to the violent events in Jerusalem by
tightening its security control over the Palestinian parts of the city,
sending in thousands of extra police forces. It also gave these policemen
almost an open hand to shoot to kill any Palestinian involved in attacks.
"Any event in which policemen or civilians are hurt must end with the
killing of the attacking terrorist," said Moshe (Chico) Edry, the
commander of Jerusalem's police.

Once again, war atmosphere in Israel. In television day and night nothing
but Palestinians stabbing, hurling, burning; current footage is recycled
ad nauseam, and, a second before vomiting, reminders from previous Intifadas
are aired, to place the present event in the right historical context. As
the fruit juice seller told me, "It has always been like that: they always
kill us. First Temple, Second Temple, the Crusades, the Holocaust, and now
this." (He was overwhelmed when I wondered where the Amalekites had gone,
who it was that killed them.) So you have on the one hand Palestinians
armed with knives and stones -- not even bombs and guns this time -- and
a regional nuclear superpower, one of the world's biggest exporters of
weaponry on the other hand, and is quite obvious that the poor, innocent
victim is the latter. When the Gods want to destroy a nation, they first
make it blind. [ . . . ]

In coping with the violence -- no community can tolerate daily stabbing
of innocents on its streets -- Netanyahu has very little to offer. After
all, he refused to negotiate with the Palestinians in years of relative
quite (in 2012, for example, not a single Israeli was killed by Palestinian
violence), so he won't start now. Demolishing terrorists' homes has been
reintroduced as a means of deterrence, a decade after the Israeli army
itself under Chief-of-Staff -- now Minister of Defense -- Ye'elon officially
recommended stopping such demolitions. With one nuance, though: now Israel
has taken the right not only to demolish the houses, but to confiscate
their land as well. And this is significant. [ . . . ]

The Palestinians constitute 35% of Jerusalem's population, a "demographic
threat" in Israeli eyes. East Jerusalem is not cut off from West Jerusalem;
this is hardly feasible, as East Jerusalem is packed with Jewish settlements.
Instead, the Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem are further cut off from
each other, encircled and besieged by checkpoints and concrete blocks. There
are small extremist Jewish settlements even within many Palestinian
neighborhood; the land of demolished houses will be given to them to
expand. Palestinians in the strangulated Jerusalem neighborhood will
have little choice but to leave to the West Bank enclaves; and, to make
things even clearer, deportations and retraction of their Israeli
citizenship are already considered. What is likely to take place now is
not a division of Jerusalem, but rather its ethnic cleansing.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has built his entire political
career on a platform of violence against Palestinians. Leading up to his
first election as prime minister in 1996 he publicly and aggressively
mocked Israel's erstwhile prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, for entering
into an interim peace agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The toxic environment Netanyahu operated in was partly behind the motivation
of a Jewish extremist to assassinate Rabin. Netanyahu prides himself on
being the leader who stopped the peace process in its tracks. To make
sure peace would never have a chance, he accelerated settlement building
in the West Bank, attacked Gaza multiple times, demolished more Palestinian
homes, arrested Palestinians, including minors, often without charges, and
failed to bring to justice the Jewish settlers who recently burned alive
a Palestinian family while they slept in their home.

But why does Israel seemingly seek violence? The answer is elementary
to anyone following this conflict. Israel has a single gamebook against
the legitimate Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence: that
of using their well-oiled military machine to squash any Palestinian who
attempts to resist occupation. Israel since 1948 and 1967 has routinely
used war and violence to seize more land, all the while pushing
Palestinians to either turn violent or emigrate.

During the past few years, Israel found itself in a strategic bind.
Palestinians shifted gears and started to operate in non-violent venues.
Palestinians call it "smart resistance." New tools of resistance, such
as calling for a boycott of Israeli products, divestment from Israeli
investments, and working to get states to apply sanctions to Israel,
contribute to this shift in strategy.

Levy says that Jewish Israelis have been able to live happily with
occupation because of three deep-rooted beliefs/blindnesses: One, we
are the chosen people, we can do anything we want, and international
law doesn't apply to us. Two, we the Jews are the biggest victim in
history and the only victim in history. Golda Meir said after the
Holocaust Jews have the right to do whatever we want. And third, that
Palestinians are not exactly human beings. "Killing Palestinians is
not really a violation of human rights."

Levy is equally succinct about what is happening today, and what
needs to change:

Now even Israeli Jewish society is threatened by "one lynch after
another, day after day." Scenes that he had never thought even
imaginable are occurring. [ . . . ]

"The two state solution is in my view dead. The settlers won."
And there is only one alternative: the one-state solution. It's not
easy. I have no illusions. "But it is the only game that is in
town . . . Therefore the struggle the discourse must
be from now on I think a very simple one. Equal rights. That's all."
[ . . . ]

Levy says that only an international intervention will save Israel's
"moral profile."

Life in Israel is too good, Israel is too strong, and brainwashing is
much too efficient to expect a change from within the Israeli society.

No country in the world remains powerful when it lives only on its
sword. . . . .

The world must bring pressure on Israel so that it will consider
whether it "is worth it" to continue the criminal occupation.

Kate, at Mondoweiss,
continues to file two or three long posts every week, compiling many of
the everyday news items that get overlooked. Here's just one little sample
that caught my eye:
Extremist settler kills
40 lambs:

An Israeli settler ran over 40 lambs in the eastern part of the West
Bank city of Nablus, on Tuesday evening. Owner Ayesh al-Da'ajneh said
that one of his sons was taking care of the lambs as they were eating
in a pasture at the edge of the city. "The Israeli vehicle approached
the lambs and my son raised a light sign in his face thinking the
settler had taken the wrong side of the road," Al-Da'ajneh said,
according to Days of Palestine. He continued: "The settler hit the
lambs several times and my son, who was unarmed, could not stop him."
Forty lambs, out of 300, were killed and at least 20 others were wounded.
Illegal Jewish Israeli settlers and armed forces frequently target
Palestinian farmers, killing their sheep and cattle, as well as
burning their crops.

I've also found the rather schematic (and studiously matter-of-fact)
lists at Wikipedia to be useful; notably:

For a sample, the entry for October 20 (the most recent day listed)
reads:

An Israeli soldier was lightly wounded, suffered scratches when
a Palestinian, Udaay Hashim al-Masalma (24) reportedly tried to stab
him during clashes at Beit Awwa, west of Hebron. Israeli sources say
the incident occurred near the settlement of Negohot, and the assailant
threw himself at troops. The suspect in turn was shot dead with a
bullet to the head.

A settler from Kiryat Arba was killed when he was run over by a
truck after he exited his car, which had been struck by rocks, and
perhaps with a gun on him. The truck-driver turned himself in to
Palestinian police, saying it was an accident.

A Palestinian, Hamzeh Moussa al-Imla (25) from Beit Ula, is
reported to have rammed his car into Israelis at a bus stop at the
Gush Etzion junction. 2 Israelis were injured, one lightly, the
other moderately. He is said also either to have tried to stab
people after getting out of his car, or to have been found with
a knife on him.

9 Gazan Palestinians were wounded by live fire, and one Ahmad
al-Sarhi (27), was shot dead. 6 were wounded east of the al-Bureij
refugee camp, and a further 3 were wounded near the Eretz Crossing.

9 West Bank Palestinians were wounded by live fire, 3 in Bireh
and 2 in Ni'lin.

Bashar Nidal al-Jabari (15) and Hussam Jamil al-Jabari (17)
were shot dead at a checkpoint near the near the Rajabi house
close to Kiryat Arba. It is alleged one of the two tried to stab
a soldier. A soldier lightly wounded.

That's one day, a rather ordinary one by present standards. The
thing is it wouldn't take much effort to radically reduce this cycle
of violence, only it has to be started by the people with the power
to change things: the government of Israel.

Music Week

Last week was disrupted by a "sleep study": turns out I don't get enough
oxygen when I sleep, which leads to all sorts of unfortunate side effects,
ranging from heart trouble to early senility. I've been feeling exceptionally
tired this week, and pretty stupid as well. Presumably an expensive treatment
regimen will follow. That is, after all, the American way.

I did make a stab at a Weekend Roundup, but didn't get it done in time
to post on Sunday. Look for it later this week -- hopefully tomorrow.
Also, beware that it won't cover all the stupid things going on in the
world right now. Thus far it's limited to Israel, and why the so-called
Third Intifada is a ruse meant to derail an increasingly successful BDS
movement by clouding the issue with senseless violence.

This week I hope to do some serious cooking. Birthday dinner is coming
up. Hopefully we can find some guests. I'm thinking Cuban, which means I'll
finally have to learn how to make coffee.

Usual mixed bag of records this week. Christgau recommended the Bottle
Rockets and two John Kruth records. I didn't find the latest Kruth [PS:
it's on Bandcamp], but
took a look at holes in both back catalogs (I only knew Kruth from his
duo with John Greene, Tribecastan). I also looked into Ulrich Gumpert's
back catalog: a pianist from East Germany, he was at the center of one
of the most adventurous jazz circles behind the Iron Curtain (along with
Conrad Bauer, Günter Sommer, Klaus Koch, and the remarkable saxophonist,
Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky). Gumpert has one of this week's two new A- jazz
records: the other I attribute to Joe McPhee but I've also seen an album
cover with Jamie Saft's name in big print, and the pianist is clearly
the one who holds it together.

Much more new jazz in the queue, including some real prospects. I
got a large package of material from a Spanish label I wasn't familiar
with: UnderPool. Also a package from my Dutch friends at ToonDist --
but it was a little light, omitting the new (and presumably last) one
from ICP Orchestra. Reports are that the brilliant Misha Mengelberg
has been sidelined with dementia -- very sad news, incredible given
the mental dexterity of his work going back to the 1960s.

Among the stupider things I did this week was to write a letter to
the Village Voice to inquire whether the new ownership might have any
interest in reviving Jazz Consumer Guide. I'm not sure that's a good
idea, but in my benighted state it seems at least like something I can
still do.

Latest Rhapsody Streamnotes draft count is 104 records. I guess that
means I'm due to release one in the next week or so. I should also note
that I took a pass at a year-end list: actually, two, one for
jazz and another for
non-jazz. I expect
to do much resorting before the actual end-of-year, as well as adding
more records, so take this list with more than the usual grain of salt.
One thing that is clear is that the jazz list is shaping up as close
to last year's (currently 52 new records, vs. 69 last year), but I'm
way short of last year's pace for non-jazz (33 vs. 76 last year). The
latter almost certainly reflects lack of effort on my part. Even
though I've kept a
tracking file this year, it isn't
very comprehensive nor have I made much effort tracking things down.
I expect to do better by the actual end-of-year, but it's beginning
to look like a tall order.

Music Week

Two weeks ago, Monday Sept. 28, we packed up the car and drove east
from Wichita, the main objective being to pick up the late Liz Fink's
dog, Sadie, and bring her back to Wichita. (For more on Liz, look
here.)
We finally got out around 1PM, bypassed Kansas City before traffic got
bad, had dinner in Columbia [MO], skipped north of St. Louis, finally
pulling into our day's destination, a cheap motel in Effingham [IL],
565 miles out. Seems like I've done that drive dozens of times -- most
recently a year ago when I drove to Cape Cod. Last year my second day
pushed into southwestern Pennsylvania, but this time we faced constant
rain and only made 405 miles, to Cambridge [OH].

That turned out to be close enough to reach Brooklyn on Wednesday.
Overcast all day, rain threatening but we never got more than a few
sprinkles here and there (and some eerie fog crossing an Appalachian
pass). Drove through the Holland Tunnel, then "straight ahead for 3.8
miles" (as the GPS lady put it: down Walker merging into Canal, over
the Manhattan Bridge, down Flatbush to Grand Army Plaza) then unload
and park -- the part I dreaded most. (We played the "alternate side"
parking game that night, then found a safe lot the next morning.)
The apartment felt disheveled but mostly familiar -- the closets had
been emptied of clothes, and someone unplugged everything so it took
a while to get Internet working. My nephew Mike came over, as did
Liz's friend Carol, who brought the dog -- a 7-year-old Cavalier King
Charles Spaniel Laura had spent much time with but I barely recognized.
(I had visited in spring 2014, my first New York venture since 2004.
In the interrim and after, Laura had been there ten or so times.)

Next day, Pearl Smith (Big Black's widow, Liz's heir, not that there's
not much Liz hadn't already given away), Larry Fink (Liz's brother, the
famed photographer), his daughter Molly (Snyder-Fink), and some others
came over to sort through affects -- packing some things to pick up later
but not taking much at the moment. Over the next few days several other
friends of Liz showed up to look around, reminiscence, and occasionally
pick up mementos. A few of our friends also came over to chat, and
sometimes to go out for a bite to eat. When we got to NYC, the weather
forecast called for five straight days of rain climaxing with Hurricane
Joaquin (expected to miss us but not clear by how much). We only ventured
into Manhattan once, a dinner with Georgia Christgau, Steve Levi, Robert
Christgau, and Carola Dibbell.

I figured the best time to get out would be Sunday afternoon. My
nephew and his fiancée came over to help us load up the car. The drive
down Flatbush, across the Manhattan Bridge, up Canal and through the
tunnel was as easy as I could imagine. I would normally have driven
half way across Pennsylvania after such an exit, but we were due for
an oil change, and the dealers didn't do service business on Sunday.
So I settled with driving to a friend's house near Newton, NJ, figuring
I'd get the oil changed first thing Monday morning. That worked out
pretty much as planned, and by 11AM we had driven back to I-80 and
turned west. We made it through Akron and turned southeast, stopping
in Mansfield, OH for the evening. Tuesday we got off to our earliest
start and wound up in Columbia, leaving about 330 miles for Wednesday,
home by 5PM.

Normally when I drive that far, I have people and spots I want to
see along the way, but Laura doesn't have a lot of patience for that,
and I was feeling pretty miserable the whole trip. Before the trip,
we had talked about the possibility of stopping in DC on the way out,
coming back through Buffalo-Detroit-Chicago, and possibly making a
side-trip to Cape Cod. None of that happened this time. (In 2004, I
drove out through Kentucky to DC, then went to western Massachusetts
before coming back through Buffalo and Detroit, then I took a detour
to Ste. Saint Marie and Duluth just to see what I had never seen
before. In 2014 I drove straight out to NJ, then on to Cape Cod, back
to NJ, up to Buffalo, then down to Arkansas and Oklahoma. In 2001 I
took a deeper southern return route, through DC into NC and across
Tennessee and Arkansas.)

Since we got home, Sadie has gotten a radical trim and been to the
vet's, so now we have all the paperwork in order to get her properly
licensed. (A lot more effort than it takes to get an UZI or AR-15 here
in Kansas.) We have a two story house (plus a basement of sorts), and
a fenced-in backyard she can have the run of -- stocked with squirrels
and birds and occasionally visited by wilder life. She seems to be
adjusting. Maybe I will too.

I didn't manage to get a Weekend Roundup done yesterday. Had to
work on the yard, plus my rhythm is totally screwed up due to a bad
head cold on top of all the time changes. Anyhow, I didn't skip this
weekly exercise because there was nothing to write. (I usually go
into a news deepfreeze when I travel but somehow missed that this
time.) Still, this week's stories diverge only marginally from last
week's, or next week's, and one gets tired of writing the same over
and over again -- so maybe the occasional break is needed just to
maintain sanity.

Still, two things I want to at least mention:

Don Melvin: At least 95 killed in twin bombings near train station in
Turkey's capital: The "twin bombings" were set to disrupt and maim
and kill peace protestors, which is to say demonstrations against the
ruling party in Turkey. Subsequent articles tell us that the official
investigation is targeting ISIS. Not clear why ISIS would bomb a demo
against Turkey's war against ISIS. Same for Turkey's perennial enemy
the PKK, since Turkey's "war against ISIS" is really little more than
cover for Turkish attacks against anti-ISIS Kurds. I'm always opposed
to whoever would do such a dire thing, but I'm even more touched by
the targeting of "my people" -- the anti-war movement.

I have very little to add about the records below -- roughly one-half
of a week's worth. The two picks were items I found on Liz Fink's shelf,
and are possibly not the best Jazz Tribune picks for either artist --
Bechet is also represented by Volumes 1/2 which goes back to the
mid-1930s, and RCA has both a slice of c. 1930 big band Armstrong and
a 1947 live set, The Complete Town Hall Concert. Also, arguably
I also overstepped my needs, in that I already have most of the music
here, in Armstrong's 4-CD The Complete RCA Victor Recordings and
Bechet's The Victor Sessions: Master Takes. Still, there's
something to be said for not coming home empty handed.

The only solution is to understand that eventually only the one people
will exist between the Jordan river and the sea, and the other people
will undergo a dreadful holocaust and annihilation. The only conclusion
is that even though the conditions are not yet ripe, we must act quietly
to lay the ground for the final extermination of the Palestinian people.

Genocidal demands, both from religious and secular political leaders,
occur every time the conflict heats up in Israel/Palestine, and indeed
that's what is happening now: the RT article notes that "Israel's military
campaign in Gaza over the past 15 days has so far resulted in the deaths
of more than 600 Palestinians, many of them women and children, with more
than 4,500 wounded."

But these
appeals by prominent Israeli religious figures are reflected in such
recent policy changes as the decision to use "live ammo" to shoot and
kill "Palestinian stone throwers" (at the same time as reports that
Israeli undercover agents have been encouraging Palestinians to throw
stones). And this is within an increasing cycle of actual violence,
one that . . .